Chang-rae Lee's fourth novel differs from the previous three in being told from the point of view of an omniscient – or, at any rate, well-informed – third-person narrator and being concerned with origins rather than destinations. The central character, June Han, is a widowed antiques dealer living in New York in 1986, but the bulk of the novel describes incidents from her past, not least because she has no future. The cancer in her stomach looks incurable and there is unfinished business to attend to. Her son, Nicholas, has disappeared in Europe, leaving a trail of petty crimes. In need of a travelling companion, June turns to the man who got her out of Korea as a young girl, a washed-up ex-soldier named Hector Brennan.

It takes Lee 300 pages to reunite the pair. Along the way, he takes in a Korean orphanage in 1953, where June lived and Hector worked as a handyman and the two formed an obsessive triangle with a minister's wife, Sylvie Tanner. We also visit Manchuria in the 1930s, where Sylvie met her future husband and witnessed the murder of her parents.

This is hefty saga territory, but the novel's length is still gratuitous. It is not even that Lee's story receives particularly patient unfolding, simply that he tells us everything several times. A long prologue firmly establishes June's tenacity and what follows only reinforces this impression. But when Hector finally encounters the adult June, we're offered yet more admiration of her "diamond hard" temperament.

Hector is dealt with in a similar way. Lee never lets us doubt that he is a good-looking waster, but a passage on page 300 delivers June's observation that his "complexion was a wonder to look at, even after all these years and despite his roughness and obvious disinterest in caring for himself". Just as June is "dogged", so Hector's circumstances are "sorry". The characters become shallower the more Lee insists on their familiar attributes.

In a tale of love and war, strong emotions emerge almost unbidden and character may be revealed through action, but Lee hammers away regardless. He uses two adjectives where one would do ("scraggly, patchy", "matted, tangled") and repeats to no purpose: "glide through the flak, slip past all disturbances"; "beneath her skin, her flesh". The novel's similes conform to a similar pattern: "The feeling of being completely sodden, like some corpse long suspended in water." The mixture of ambition and clumsiness calls to mind John Irving, but Irving's work has a readable energy where Lee is merely portentous.

The Surrendered, the recipient of enthusiastic reviews in the United States, intermittently offers itself as a modern variation of The Iliad. As well as allusions – Hector comes from Ilion, New York – there are attempts at epic diction. These moments sit somewhat awkwardly with the rest of the book's prose, which is overblown in a less exalted tradition. It is odd to read about Hector being "encumbered with time's accruals" when he has earlier been identified as a "historic drinker"..

As if all this weren't enough, the reader is required to tussle with oddities of usage. The word "like" is used where "such as" is required (in one weird passage, "like of" is used rather than "as of"); "he" and "they" are preferred to "him" and "them". Lee uses the word "thusly" ("thus" is already an adverb) and on more than one occasion, the tautological phrase "lay prostrate".

But while he ignores the rules of grammar, he is evidently happy to follow less profitable conventions. We hear about "that final night" and the incident that "changed everything". These are the aged strategies of the war-torn love story, a genre only redeemed (The English Patient, Atonement) when the prose is immaculate rather than pock-marked and potential vices toyed or tampered with rather than embraced.